Saturday, August 29, 2015

With the now overwhelming evidence that the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is dependent on Grondin’s Interlinear in Coptic . . . and English, I think it is now reasonable to assert simply that the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was forged using Grondin’s Interlinear. Given this assumption, the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus fragment must have been forged sometime after November 2002 (when the PDF version of Grondin’s Interlinear containing the typographical/grammatical error also found in line 1 of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was put online) and before the Summer of 2010 (when it was first brought to the attention of Karen King).

The Victories hold a jewelled cross flanked by Christian nomina sacra, showing the interaction between classical and Christian motifs. The expansion of the Roman Empire saw the development of Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. In Egypt, the iconography of these religions fused. Sculpture shows the adoption of Roman symbols of power to articulate authority - such as a statues of the falcon-headed ancient Egyptian god Horus wearing Roman armour. Magical texts on papyrus and so-called magical gems show the layering of aspects of deities especially from the Egyptian, Greek, Roman pantheons. In this period the God of the Jews and Christians is one among many.

The rubbish heaps of ancient and medieval towns in Egypt have preserved the earliest fragments of scripture, legal documents, letters, school exercises and other texts showing how religion was lived. Their survival is treasure from trash providing unparalleled insight into everyday society. There are copies of official letters, including one from the emperor Claudius (r. AD 41-54) concerning the cult of the divine emperor and the status of Jews in Alexandria, and another from a mosque to the half-sister of the Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim (r. AD 985-1021), demonstrating relationships between the state and religion.

The exhibition finishes with the astonishing survival of over 200,000 texts from Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, where they were keep in a genizah (a sacred storeroom) for ritual disposal. By an accident of history they were not destroyed. Mainly dating to the 11-13th centuries AD and written in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Arabic, they show a thriving Jewish community with international links extending from Spain to India. Together the collection is not only the best evidence for the daily lives of Jews in Medieval Cairo, but for the wider Medieval Mediterranean society including Muslims and Christians.

The best-known Egyptian papyri corpus is the Oxyrhynchus papyri, on which much more here and links. But I don't know where in Egypt the papyri on display in this exhibition are from. Also, much more on the Cairo Geniza is here and links.

But the FBI isn’t just interested in stopping the outpouring of cultural heritage from countries under the control of ISIS—they’re warning US-based dealers because there are serious criminal penalties involved. Buying a piece, even inadvertently, from ISIS could be prosecuted as aiding a terrorist organization here in the US. And member countries of the UN must, under a new resolution, “take steps to prevent terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria from receiving donations and from benefiting from trade in oil, antiquities, and hostages.”

Aristophil, the scandal-hit French company that amassed the world’s largest private collection of manuscripts, has been liquidated and its stock will be put up for sale. The 5 August judgment in the Commercial Court, Paris, was based on its “complete insolvency”.

The company’s accounts were frozen in November 2014 by state prosecutors, who described Aristophil as a type of Ponzi scheme (in which existing investors are paid by new investors, rather than out of profits). A mansion owned by the company in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, was sold in July for around €28m, the proceeds of which went to Aristophil’s bank, Société Générale.

[...]

Aristophil has an inventory of 54 manuscript collections (around 135,000 documents), in which nearly 18,000 investors bought shares. These include fragments from the Dead Sea scrolls, medieval illuminated manuscripts and the Marquis de Sade’s 120 days of Sodom (1785).

Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.

The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making, with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints’ lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story, A State of Mixture helps explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries.

Hannibal still has a reputation as one of the greatest military strategists in history. One of the problems in trying to get an accurate picture of his life and career is that virtually all of the sources about him were written by Romans, the people who persisted against his serious threat to their continuance as a Mediterranean power and eventually defeated him, or by others influenced by Rome. Eve MacDonald, an archeologist and lecturer at the University of Reading, produced an excellent biography that attempts to understand Hannibal both within and outside the Roman context.

Xerxes has had bad press. The louche tyrant of the Greek sources and a dupe and comic stooge in the Hebrew Book of Esther would become, in the preposterous Hollywood movie 300: Rise of an Empire, a satanic entity, a proto-Islamic State fanatic. Even in Iran his reputation is, at best, ambiguous. I have met many young Iranians whose names, Kourosh and Dariush, are proudly sported in emulation of the ancient greats, Cyrus and Darius. But I know only one Khashayar, Xerxes. He runs a bookshop in Isfahan. Next time I’m there, I’ll give him a copy of Stoneman’s rewarding life (and afterlife) of Xerxes. I want Khashayar to be proud of his namesake.

The book is:

Xerxes: A Persian Life
By Richard Stoneman
Yale University Press, 288pp, £25.00
ISBN 9780300180077
Published 13 August 2015

NEWBERRY — Newberry native Will Moseley recently took part in an excavation in the ancient synagogue at Horvat Kur in Israel, uncovering a partially preserved colorful mosaic floor.

Moseley was working the Horvat Kur excavation site with Wofford Professor of Religion Byron McCane, four other Wofford students, a Wofford graduate and a host of other college and university students from all over the world who are part of the Kinneret Regional Project.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

TOO MUCH OF THE MEDIA just doesn't get the current scholarly discussion about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. The issue, insofar as it is an issue at all, is whether the fragment is a modern forgery or the remains of an ancient manuscript dating to centuries after the time of Jesus which tells a legendary story that involves Jesus having a wife. If the fragment is authentic, it has been suggested that the original text of which it is a copy could date to as early as the second century. I have seen that asserted, but never argued. Still, this is long after any living memory of Jesus.

The current very strong consensus is that it is a modern forgery. I think this is correct beyond any reasonable doubt. But evidently Karen King still wants to defend the authenticity of the fragment — that is that it is an ancient account of an otherwise lost apocryphal legend involving Jesus' wife. We will all be happy to consider any peer-review publication that wants to make that argument, but in the meantime just about all specialists find the case for it being a modern forgery convincing.

Be that as it may, no one, and I mean no one, thinks that this text, even on the remote contingency that it is genuine, provides any information about any putative wife or marriage of the historical Jesus. It's not an issue. Not at all.

Why is that so hard? Yet note the headlines of the following articles on the recent discussion.

Jesus had wife: Gospel origins begin to emerge (Yahoo/News7). The article is more nuanced than the headline, but the accompanying ABC News video segment ("Was Jesus Married? An intriguing clue") completely missed the point, has many inaccuracies, and gives a very misleading presentation of the current discussion.

Now I grant you two things. First, sometimes the articles above are less misleading than the headlines. This might exonerate the writers of the articles, but the headlines are still inexcusable. People often learn about news stories just by a quick glance at a headline, and countless people will have come to the conclusion that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife has something to do with whether Jesus actually was married thanks to these headlines.

Second, many of these headlines come from smaller outfits that perhaps don't have the editorial standards of the major mainstream media. Nevertheless, I expect better, for example, from Yahoo, ABC News, and the International Business Times.

So, three lessons here. First, never, ever trust a headline. Second, anyone can set up a "news" site on the Internet, so don't believe anything you read there unless you know the source is reliable. And third, and most disquieting of all, do not trust even the mainstream media about anything they say. There are notable exceptions, but too often their coverage is lazy, sensationalistic, and garbled.

In Palmyra, history is literally written on the walls: across temples and above doorways, encircling funerary monuments and snaking up the towering limestone columns that rise above the Syrian desert some 134 miles (215 km) northeast of Damascus.

These inscriptions were often written both in Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic, a bilingual phenomenon unique to Palmyra. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage site that has been a focus of international attention since May, when the Islamic State (ISIS) seized the territory around the ancient ruins.

The inscriptions provide unique insight into life in a distinctive frontier city where, for centuries, local merchants controlled trade between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.

Yet it is impossible to read Sunday’s reports of the demolition of one of the best-preserved and grandest relics in the ancient ruins of Palmyra, the Temple of Baalshamin, and not feel anguish at the loss of another irreplaceable monument of our shared past. True, the temple stood near a Roman amphitheater where ISIS is reported to have executed 25 prisoners last month. But to grieve at the loss of a great work of art does not diminish the horror at the loss of human lives, and in tandem they amount to a unified and barbaric attempt to erase not only whole peoples but also their religions, cultures and histories.

[...]

However daunting the struggles of the Middle East, ISIS stands out in the threat it poses to humanity. But for all its well-publicized atrocities, it is neither all powerful nor immune to military and economic pressures from the West. It can and must be stopped, and the United States and its allies cannot relent in their efforts toward that end.

Destruction unleashed by jihadi group on historic sites in area it overruns has not been seen in decades, archeologists say, warn of potential ramification to heritage research • But Islamic State is only following the footsteps of other fanatics.

The British Library is to lend one of its greatest treasures, the world’s oldest bible, to the British Museum for an ambitious and groundbreaking exhibition exploring 1,200 years of Christian, Islamic and Jewish faith in Egypt after the pharaohs.

The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world and has only been lent once, in 1990 – also to the British Museum – when both collections shared the same building.

“It is quite phenomenal they they are able to lend it to us,” said Elisabeth O’Connell, assistant keeper in the British Museum’s department of ancient Egypt and Sudan. “We are absolutely thrilled.”

The codex dates back to the 4th century AD. Handwritten in Greek, not long after the reign of the Emperor Constantine the Great, it contains the earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament.

[...]

Not to take away from the importance of this marvelous manuscript or of the exhibition, but I want to nuance the headline of this article a little. The Codex Sinaiticus once contained the entire Bible and a few other things, but a considerable portion of the Old Testament is now missing. The oldest surviving complete Bible is Codex Ambrosianus B.21, from the late sixth or early seventh century CE.

Among the artifacts featured in the 7,000-square-foot exhibition are fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran, Israel, a large 1,300 pound stone from the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Jewish devotional objects taken into space by former astronaut David Wolf, the trunk Brigham Young carried from New York to Utah, a piece of the Kiswah (a gold-embroidered fabric, which drapes the Kaaba in Mecca), a throne built for the Dalai Lama’s U.S. visit in 2010, a sand mandala created by Buddhist monks at the museum, a replica of the Shroud of Turin, and Ganesh statue (Hindu god of good fortune).

Religion - Manuscripts - Media Culture
A blog on the transmission, use, and transformation of the so-called Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, with a particular focus on the manuscripts containing them, practices and media cultures framing their use in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the scholarly paradigms that shape the way we study them today

I have expressed my opinion that the GJW has been so exhaustively proved a forgery, that the matter could be laid to rest. With regard to provenance documents and the identity of the present owner, I had surmised that King had legal or ethical reasons for withholding these. After all, what more could be gained from identifying the forger when everyone knows that the GJW is a fake? Her suggestion that the GJW could be authentic has caused me to reconsider. I would suggest that, if she considers the debate “ongoing,” then she should without hesitation produce the relevant materials. Furthermore, I would suggest that it would be disingenuous of King to conduct further Raman-spectroscopy testing (or the like) in highly-speculative support of authenticity and to simultaneously withhold documents which would almost certainly demonstrate forgery.

He also responds to claims about the ink used on the GJW fragment and the Harvard Lycopolitan John.

The cooperative network Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies is dedicated to academic dialogue in the field of Oriental manuscript studies with the focus on the Mediterranean and North African cultural areas.
It organizes conferences and workshops; publishes journals and monographs; issues a regular mailing list; and facilitates exchange and cooperation in related fields.

James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church opens fresh ground in our understanding of Christian origins through an exploration of the role of James in the founding of the church. Based on the author's doctoral research, that first Christian church, with its roots in the Baptist movement, is shown to be part of the broad contemporary Judaic movement for the restoration of Israel. The events surrounding the death of Jesus (their leader's brother) both confirmed their commitment to Judaic reform and transformed their understanding of it. Despite the impact of that experience, they seem to have had neither knowledge nor interest in the teaching and ministry of Jesus in Galilee.
Set in the world of James, this careful study of the difficulties and opportunities facing Judaic peasants in first-century Palestine proposes that James and his other brothers moved to Jerusalem (where work was available) several years before the final visit of Jesus and, under James's leadership, became the kernel of a growing group of followers of the Baptist that would later emerge onto the page of history as the Jerusalem Church.

The truth may be finally emerging about the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," a highly controversial papyrus suggesting that some people, in ancient times, believed Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. New research on the papyrus' ink points to the possibility that it is authentic, researchers say, while newly obtained documents may shed light on the origins of the business-card-sized fragment.

[...]

If the tests show the ink to be ancient, that is interesting, but it doesn't necessarily prove anything. Ancient ink sometimes survives in inkwells and such (see the second update to the post). Add distilled water and you have ancient ink.

This new modern paleographic evidence is potentially important:

After searching public databases in Florida a Live Science reporter uncovered seven signatures signed by Laukamp between 1997 and 2001 on five notarized documents. Anyone can search these databases and download these documents. These signatures can be compared with the signature recording the sale of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife — providing another way to verify or disprove the story of how the "gospel" made its way to Harvard.

And this (for context see the article and this post) strikes me as a very unconvincing argument:

King objected to this conclusion in her Biblical Archaeology Review letter, noting that the John fragment could have been copied in ancient times, long after Lycopolitan went extinct, from a text that had similar line breaks.

But this is more interesting:

"In our first exploration, we did state that the inks used for the two documents of interest [the John papyrus and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife] were quite different. The more recent results do confirm this observation strongly," Yardley told Live Science.

We'll have to see what the peer-reviewed publications have to say. As it stands, the consensus is very much that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is a modern forgery and many arguments have been advanced to support that conclusion. If Professor King or anyone else want to show otherwise, those arguments will all need to be addressed.

As I've said before, it's always possible that we won the lottery this time and the fragment is genuine. But I don't like to play the lottery.

An old post on the archaeology of Palmyra is here with links. And much more on Palmyra and its recent fate is herehere and here and links. For more on the assault of ISIS on the past and its caretakers follow the links in those posts and see also the (immediately preceding) related post here.

Curating antiquities or attending international conferences on archaeology have become capital offenses, according to some who claim to be “religious purists.” Two more Syrian nationalists who have served all of us by protecting and preserving our global cultural heritage in this cradle of civilization were murdered within the past two weeks, just six days apart.

Qassim Abdullah Yehya 37, and Khaled al-Assad 83, were two of the 14 committed professionals serving their country and all of humanity through current and past associations with Syria’s renowned Directorate General of Antiquities & Museums (DGAM). As with a dozen of their DGAM colleagues before them, Mssrs. Yehya and al-Assad have also [sic; add "been" - JRD] murdered in the line of duty since the March 2011 Syrian crisis erupted. According to today’s latest UN statistics, more than 250,000 Syrians have lost their lives, utterly devastating their families and loved ones, over the past 53 months of nearly unimaginable carnage.

[...]

According to Dr. Lamb, Qassim Abdullah Yehya was killed in August by "rebels near Douma, a close-in eastern Gouta superb of Damascus." No further information about them is given. The article also contains further details on the death of Khaled al-Assad. Dr. Lamb appears to be in a position to know this sort of information, but I have no verification at this point.

Related post here. More on the murder of Khaled al-Assad by ISIS is here and links.

The entire saga of preserving and showcasing ancient Sebastia unfolds like a comedy of errors which could only occur in the Wild West Bank. Israel controls the park containing the ancient finds, which is in Area C, but does nothing with it. The Palestinians say they want to control it, but lack the resources to develop it. And while both sides lay claim to the site as their exclusive cultural heritage, it lies neglected, underdeveloped, unexcavated.

[...]

The PA’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities brochure avoids any mention of Israel or a Jewish connection to the site. It notes that Sebastia was “an important administrative and political regional capital during the Iron Age II and III” and was “a major urban center during the Hellenistic period,” but makes no reference to the Israelite Kingdom or the Hasmoneans.

A Palestinian description of Sebastia in a bid to have it listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site goes to even greater lengths to omit references to the city’s Jewish history, referring to it as the former “capital of the northern kingdom during the Iron Age II,” and alluding to Jewish figures such as Omri and John Hyrcanus without explanation.

On the other hand, the Nature and Parks Authority’s site makes no reference whatsoever to the village, home to 3,000 Palestinians, in which the church-turned-mosque is located, to the Church of St. John the Baptist located in the ruins, or to the former Crusader presence in Sebastia.

YOU'D BE SURPRISED. Are Firsthand Accounts More Reliable? (Anthony Le Donne, The Jesus Blog). Josephus was an eyewitness to much of what he wrote about, but contradictory versions of the same events in his works show him not to be a particularly reliable eyewitness. It is often (not necessary always) wiser to use circumstantial evidence and multiple accounts of similar events and situations to make generalizations about the past than to trust the veracity of any single account — even an eyewitness one — of any given event.

Asaad’s death is the latest tragedy in a war that, with each passing day, manages to push the boundaries of brutality. And it highlights an aspect of archaeology that is often lost amid accounts of the looting of antiquities: Around the world, in lawless and war-torn regions, archaeologists and museum staffers frequently risk their lives to protect artifacts that have endured for centuries.

In the late 1920’s, a Jewish farmer discovers a pit/cave as he is plowing his field in Israel. He is startled, but manages to identify the golden items as the holy vessels as used in the First Temple of Solomon. He draws a makeshift map and travels to New York with all the information on his findings. There he tracks down a certain Rabbi Herman (from the famous book: ALL FOR THE BOSS) and asks him what to do with his new secret. The Rabbi cross-examines the farmer in order to verify the story, then sends his son (from the Mir Talmudic Yeshivah in Poland) over to a great Jewish sage living in Radin with a confidential letter and map, asking his coveted opinion on what to do next. The sage firstly confirms the site and states that the time has not yet arrived to reveal these Temple items, and in fact, all parties will forget the whole thing until many years later, on the day that this Israeli farmer dies.

The fascinating story continues. While studying in Lakewood, New Jersey, Herman’s son suddenly remembers the whole episode in Poland, including the map, and passes everything on to another prestigious member of his family. One thing led to another, and believe it or not, there are those living in Israel today that know approximately where this underground cave lies, the very same one that is part of this authentic story!

Too good to be true? Not at all.

[...]

It's a good story, but until I see some actual golden vessels from the First Temple era, it's just a story. Elements of it remind me of The Treatise of the Vessels, on which you can find many posts here and links.